Orphans of Eldorado - Milton Hatoum [23]
And what am I going to live off?
You could sell one of the properties. Even Horadour Bonplant wants to sell his perfumery. In this place, only politicians can afford to go to sleep and wake in a good mood.
Estiliano looked at me pessimistically, which was more painful than an outright insult. Was he foreseeing my future? He noticed that the pallor in my face was caused by some terrible remembrance which, unintentionally, he was excavating in my memory.
You should visit the plantation, he said. Then you can decide if it’s better to sell it.
He gave me money to hire a boat, pay a pilot and buy food. I took Florita and the box from the Mandarim shop, with documents I’d not read. Amando’s papers.
The plantation was in the flood plain of the Uaicurapá. One night long ago, I can’t remember when, I saw Amando pointing at the sky and comparing the size of Boa Vida to the moon. The difference is that there’s a lot of water and fish here, and I’m going to harvest a lot of cocoa, he said. Florita thought he was going mad, addressing the moon and talking about planting cocoa. Pests destroyed this agricultural dream. Only the house survived, with the veranda and the parlour facing the river.
It was such a long time since I’d set foot in Boa Vida. Florita looked at the old pastures with sadness: nothing but wild grass and the burnt stumps of trees. The cocoa trees, their leaves rusted, were dead. The termites had overrun the walls and beams of the house. While Florita and the pilot were cleaning the rooms and the veranda, I looked at the old silk-cotton tree beside the river.
It’s the highest tree in the world, my father used to say. Some scumbag who worked in Boa Vida messed with your mother. He was hanged from a high branch. He was already dead when I put a bullet through the rope. The body fell into the water and was later put on a raft that the river took away with it. Two men followed the raft and had some fun aiming at the corpse’s neck. Way down the river, near the Paraná branch of the river, they stuck the scoundrel’s head on a stake. The vultures had a good time, and no one ever messed with your mother again. No one. She lived for me until the day she gave birth to you.
Amando’s rifle, hat and boots were hanging on the wall. And his portrait hung there too, between the weapon and the hat. Did Estiliano know that story? And Florita and Mother Caminal? What does one friend know about another? Or did he keep silent? I didn’t feel right in Boa Vida. A beautiful place, with scarlet ibis and jaçanãs in the sky and the trees. The dark, shimmering waters of the Uaicurapá, the island which appeared when the river was low, when I speared fish with a harpoon and played alone on the beach. Wild Muscovy duck and teal screamed in the high branches of the silk-cotton tree. The tree must still be there, shading the house that some tenant farmers had occupied since the Second World War. It wasn’t the place itself that upset me: it was my memories of it. The employees’ children came up to the veranda and stopped and stared at the house. Silent children, offspring of silent men. The only real voice was Amando’s—the voice that was to be obeyed. They say the cocoa plantation failed in a very short time. Then my father burnt the forest to make pasture. He was successful, even buying a barge to transport rubber, Brazil nuts and wood from the middle reaches of the Amazon to Belém. The Boa Vida became a country retreat. The hanged man—decapitated. Amando liked recounting this episode over and over again, and one time he addressed himself neither to the moon nor to me: he was speaking to my mother, as if she were still alive. I believed that story, and I remembered another: the one about the severed head. Different stories, but Amando’s words frightened me even more. Because he believed in what he was saying. And because he was oblivious to my fear.
That night, I tried to sleep in my parents’ bedroom; in the morning I was woken by a sound of hissing. A bat, twisting in flight, had got caught in the